THROUGHOUT the congressional session, the thought uppermost in the
minds of the nation's leaders was the approaching election of 1872. Men
with presidential ambitions and politicians who fattened on the spoils
of office came to the last session of the Forty-First and the first session
of the Forty-Second Congress prepared to keep an eye on the political
barometer. As the Administration marshalled its followers, dividing
submissive sheep from recalcitrant goats--and sedulously built up the
Treaty of Washington, the receding debt, and the Ku Klux legislation
into a "record of achievement"--the Democrats, the politically ambitious, and those malcontents who had been driven from the public
trough sought devices by which they might embarrass the party in
power. Though they seldom took a position which concealed the partisan nature of their opposition, they voiced their concerted objections
to each Administration project, and sought diligently to discredit it
before the people.

When the Forty-First Congress reassembled after the elections of 1870, the enemies of the Administration hoped to make political capital out of the rising demand for civil service reform. The defects in
the existing system were so evident that only such arrant spoilsmen as Conkling, Carpenter, Chandler, and Morton could look at them without
blushing. Long agitation for civil service reform had made the people
sensitive to the situation and even clamorous for a change. But Grant
and his advisers were fully aware of the popular will, and in his message of 1870 the President aligned himself with the reformers. J. D.
Cox, who in resigning from the Cabinet had sought to identify himself
with the reformers, doubted Grant's sincerity. "We ought to force this
lip service into real action," he wrote Garfield.1 Schurz, too, charged Grant with hypocrisy, and introduced a Civil Service Bill in the Senate. But Grant gave his blessing to the measure, and it was his approval, rather than Schurz's activity, which finally put it through as
a rider to an appropriation. As further proof of his sympathy with

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.